One of the greatest practical astronomers of all time, Samanta Chandrasekhar (or Pathani Samanta as he is popularly called) extended and enriched the scope of Indian astronomy by his practical observations made with his own instruments.  While the saga of Indian astronomy is as old as the Vedas, there had been regular contributions from many outstanding scholars like Aryabhatta-I of Kusumapura (476 A.D), Varahmihira of Ujjaini (503 A.D), Brahmagupta of Bhillamala (598 AD.), Bhaskara-II (1114 A.D.) and many others. Samanta Chandrasekhar is said to be the last link in the long list of  classical Indian astronomers.

Chandrasekhar was born on 13th December, 1835 in a royal family of the princely state of Khandapara in the district of Nayagarh nearly 80 km to the north-west of Bhubaneswar. Struck by poverty, child Chandrasekhar had no scope of receiving  formal school education or any access to the breath-taking developments of science sweeping the whole of the Western world at that time. Only a paltry collection of books in the family library written in Sanskrit on palm leaves was the main source of knowledge for him. He had to content himself within the hills and jungles of his native place with only the stars as his guide.

At the age of ten, one of his uncles initiated him to astronomy and showed him a few stars in the sky. This aroused his curiosity to watch and observe the stars on a sustained basis.  At the age of fifteen, he noticed that the position and the motion of the planets were not in accordance with the rules put forward by the famous astronomical texts of that time. He wondered whether the rules prescribed by the famous texts were fundamentally wrong or his observations lacked  the accuracy as demanded by the merit of such task. Only correct measurement was the solution for settling this doubt. As there was no instrument maker to supply him with the requisite devices to carry out  such measurements, he went on to construct his own instruments out of commonly available materials like bamboo, wood etc.

His armoury of instruments include a stick called ‘Shanku’, a ‘T’ shaped instrument called ‘Mana Yantra’ and an armillary sphere called ‘Gola Yantra’. The Shanku was a vertical stick of known height fixed on a level ground. By observing its shadow cast by the sun, it was possible to determine the local time, latitude of a place, the declination and the position of the sun in the zodiac belt. But his most favourite instrument was the Mana Yantra, which was capable of measuring the angles in the sky and the ground. With this instrument, he measured the height of the Saptasajya mountain with a fair degree of accuracy upon a request by the then British commissioner of Cuttack Mr. Cooks. Gola Yantra was a three-dimensional model of the celestial sphere capable of  measuring the latitude and longitude of celestial bodies. Needless to say t hat the clear and blue vault of the sky was his observatory.

Armed with these devices, Chandrasekhar spent nights after nights in the all-absorbing work of star gazing. At the age of twenty-two Chandrasekhar started to record his observations systematically and compiled these findings in a masterpiece  treatise in Sanskrit called the ‘Siddhanta Darpana’, which he completed at the age of only thirty-four.

Amongst his major contributions to the world of astronomy, are the compilation of accurate data for various planetary parameters, detection of three anomalies in the motion of the moon, improving the predicted times of the eclipses, improving the ratio of the distances for the sun and moon and the correction for the mean positions of the planets for predicting various celestial events over thousands of years. He is the only Indian astronomer to have observed and recorded the rare transit of the planet Venus over the sun’s disc in 1874. For all these achievements, he was conferred the title Mahamahopadhyaya in 1893 by the British government in a special convocation ceremony held at Cuttack. His treatise Siddhanta Darpana earned him wide acclaim abroad. His work was highly appreciated by the prestigious British journal ‘Nature’  and the American Journal ‘Knowledge’.

Samanta Chandrasekhar is clearly the pride of Orissa. He symbolizes how best the human talent can rise within various constraints and hence, his life and work continues to be a source of inspirations for the young Oriyas for years to come.